Albert Gallatin

Before returning to more serious posts, I thought I’d mention this interesting factoid that I came across recently. Albert Gallatin was a Swiss-born politician who was the longest-serving Treasury Secretary in our history (from 1801 to 1814). Before that, though, Gallatin was elected to the Senate in 1793. When he arrived at the Capitol, though, his credentials were challenged because he allegedly had not been a United States citizen for nine years, as required by the Constitution. The Senate, after a debate which was the first one that they ever opened to the public, refused to seat Gallatin on a party-line vote. (He was a Jeffersonian, but the Senate was controlled by the Federalists.)

I think this is the only time that Congress has excluded an elected member for failure to meet the Qualifications Clause (age, residence, and citizenship). If anyone knows of another case, I’d be curious to hear about that.

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Gerard Magliocca

Gerard N. Magliocca is the Samuel R. Rosen Professor at the Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law. Professor Magliocca is the author of three books and over twenty articles on constitutional law and intellectual property. He received his undergraduate degree from Stanford, his law degree from Yale, and joined the faculty after two years as an attorney at Covington and Burling and one year as a law clerk for Judge Guido Calabresi on the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Professor Magliocca has received the Best New Professor Award and the Black Cane (Most Outstanding Professor) from the student body, and in 2008 held the Fulbright-Dow Distinguished Research Chair of the Roosevelt Study Center in Middelburg, The Netherlands. He was elected to the American Law Institute (ALI) in 2013.

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James Shields (Irish-born) was naturalized on Oct. 21, 1840. He won election to the U.S. Senate from Illinois in 1848. Calhoun introduced a resolution that Shields’ election was void, since he hadn’t been a U.S. citizen for nine years. Shields tried to resign during this process, but the Senate refused to accept his resignation. It instead approved Calhoun’s resolution and declared the seat vacant.

Shields won the ensuing special election and began serving in Oct. 1849, just over nine years after his naturalization. Fun little story!